“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
We were thirty-five minutes late to the social.
She carried the pan into the fellowship hall herself. She wouldn’t let me take it. Half the people in that church basement had a scanner sitting on their kitchen counter at home, and every one of them had heard it.
The room went quiet when she came through the door. Completely quiet. Then, after a second, it went right back to talking, because that’s how people there do things. They don’t make a fuss.
But there was a cup of coffee poured and a chair pulled out before she ever set that pan down.
Nobody cut those lemon bars. You couldn’t cut them. They ate them with spoons, standing around the table, and the pan came home empty.
That night I went to her bedroom closet and took the headset down off the top shelf. It was in a shoebox. The foam on one ear had been replaced at some point with a different color. There was black electrical tape wound around the band where her hair had worn the plastic smooth over thirty-four years.
